Saturday, September 05, 2015

Ultimate Astros: Gene Elston, the quiet Midwesterner who taught thousands of fans the basics of the game as the original voice of Major League Baseball in Houston, has died at age 93.

Elston had been in declining health for several months and died peacefully, his son, Kim, said in an e-mail Saturday.
He broadcast Colt .45s and Astros games on radio and television from 1962 through 1986 and was selected as the 2006 winner of the Ford Frick Award from the National Baseball Hall of Fame for broadcasting contributions.

Friday, September 04, 2015

It's been announced on Facebook that Warren Murphy, famed for The Destroyer series, and many others, has passed away. I read and enjoyed many of his books, and just this afternoon was looking at a copy of Leonardo's Law. I was lucky enough to meet him and talk to him at a few conventions, and he never forgot that I was one of the first reviewers (40 or so years ago now) to heap praise on The Destroyer series. He'll be greatly missed.

Merle Haggard on today's country music: It's crap: "I can't tell what they're doing," says The Hag. "They're talking about screwing on a pickup tailgate and things of that nature. I don't find no substance. I don't find anything you can whistle and nobody even attempts to write a melody. It's more of that kids stuff. It's hot right now, but I'll tell you what, it's cooling off."

H. A. DeRosso westerns are generally thought of as being a little bit darker in tone than most, and this one's no exception. However, [SPOILER ALERT] it does have a conventional ending. [END OF ALERT]The point-of-view character is Britton, who heads up a group of mustangers. Britton, to put it mildly, has serious anger issues. His anger often gets the upper hand on him because he seems to find it almost impossible to control. He and his two-man crew are operating on land close to the large Chain Link ranch, owned by a man named Hepburn, who has a beautiful daughter named Stella. If I have to tell you that Stella falls for Britton (and vice-versa), then you haven't read many westerns. In this case, however, it's impossible for me to understand why she does. He's an ex-con with anger issues. Personally, I think she's making a mistake. Hepburn also has a foreman named Rambone, and he dislikes Britton on sight, mainly because he has his own plans for Stella.DeRosso is good at letting us see the other characters only as Britton sees them, which leads to some interesting developments late in the novel. There's plenty of action, too, and DeRosso handles that well. There's also one character who might as well be wearing a sandwich board emblazoned with the words "I Am Going to Die," but I can overlook that. It's really heavy-handed, though.All in all, I'd rate this a somewhat above average western, but it's not in the same class as The Gun Trail. Maybe I'll reprint that review some Friday since it's 10 years old now.

Robert Skinner returns to crime fiction after too long an absence with a dandy new historical. The setting is New Orleans in 1944, and things get off to a fast start with a murder that's investigated by Des Cortes. Meanwhile, a lowlife named Al Martin gets out of prison and immediately picks up his son and takes him with him to introduce him to a life of crime. Des' brother, Sal, is hired by the boy's mother to find him. Al is part of a gang put together by Fade Taber, whose plan is to rob one of the local banks. Skinner weaves these plot threads (and several more) together skilfully to put together a novel that's a mystery and a caper rolled into one. Highly recommended.

. . . and not it's the Voodoo Visit! Orlando Sentinel: An Orlando woman who only spoke "gibberish'' pulled out strands of her mother's hair and kicked an officer after someone linked to voodoo visited their home, a report says. Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.

Coloring books for adults becoming a popular hobbyHat tip to Art Scott.And does this mean a re-release of this?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkTGbWZdGGgHow about this?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dhmoi590M1QOr this?https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PL2prMmPmQ4

Dead Heat with the Reaper isn't a novel. It's two novellas, and in each one the main character is more or less in the situation indicated by the title.In "Legacy" a retired guy named Frank Trask learns that he has only a short time to live. He wants to put it to good use, but he also wants to help out someone who needs the kind of assistance that money can't provide. It requires a special kind of person, and Frank just might be the one."The Creep" is Alan Baldocchi, who survived an IED in Afghanistan but who's so horribly scarred that he frightens people. He's retreated into alcoholism and an attitude that scares people as much or more than his appearance. Against all the odds he develops a friendship with a young woman, but both of the have been targeted by a gang of toughs. Someone's going to have to step up. Like Frank Trask, Baldocci might be the only one who can.Both novellas feature sharp writing and characterization. They're intense hardboiled fiction in small doses.

PodOmatic | Best Free Podcasts: Tim L. Williams returns to our podcast series this month with a reading of his 2014 International Thriller Award winning story “The Last Wrestling Bear in West Kentucky,” which first appeared in EQMM’s September/October 2014 issue and has since been reprinted in a collection of his stories entitled Skull Fragments. His previous podcast for this series is episode 60’s “Where That Morning Sun Goes Down.”

“A Belgian Mystery (Solved by Poirot Himself)” (By Hilde Vandermeeren) | SOMETHING IS GOING TO HAPPEN: Hilde Vandermeeren, a psychologist and former teacher, had authored some forty books for children (winning numerous literary prizes for them) before she wrote her first crime novel, When Darkness Fell, in 2013—and it won the Hercule Poirot Public (or “Readers”) Award. A second thriller, The Witnesses, followed in 2014, and a third, Quiet Ground, in May 2015. The author’s EQMM debut is coming soon, in our March/April 2016 double issue. In this post Hilde discusses some of the obstacles women writers face in the field of crime fiction in her native Belgium.—Janet Hutchings

Back in the 1950s, the authors at Gold Medal Books used just about every variation on the James M. Cain themes of lust, greed, and murder that they could think of. Lawrence Block was published by Gold Medal starting around 1960, and at the same time he was writing "mid-century erotica" under various names for various imprints. Now imagine what would happen if Block decided to write one of those Gold Medal novels at the present time and to incorporate all the sex of one of the works of mid-century erotica but make it as explicit as the current century allows. And to provide a twist that Gold Medal didn't. That will give you some idea of what's going on in The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes.The setting is classic: a sleepy Florida town. Doak Miller, a retired NYC cop, moves there. He hasn't had a bad life, but he's always felt that something was missing. He has a fantasy about finding the one woman, the perfect one for him. And sure enough, he does. There's just one problem. She's looking for someone to kill her husband. And Doak Miller is just the man to do it.Miller doesn't mind killing the guy, who's a terrible person, at least according to his wife. Miller watches Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice, so he's well aware of how the story is supposed to turn out. Will that stop him?I've already mentioned that there's a lot of explicit sex in this book, and I should add that there's some explicit violence, too. I'm not going to tell you how it all turns out.What I will tell you is that this book isn't noir by my definition, but it might be by yours. I'll add that Block is not the kind of writer who's going to give you what you expect. He's way too good for that.[THE FOLLOWING MIGHT BE MILDLY SPOILERY, SO I ADVISE YOU TO SKIP IT.] The Girl with the Deep Blue Eyes is a terrific variation on themes you might be familiar with, and it's both surprising and shocking. The ending provides a genuine chill. I wouldn't hand this book to my maiden aunt in Dubuque, if I had a maiden aunt in Dubuque, but for everybody else it's top-of-the-line entertainment.

If you haven't seen this movie, you might not think of Tommy Lee Jones as the action hero and romantic lead type. You might not think of him that way after you see the movie, either, but he does a pretty good job. Besides, there's also Linda Hamilton with some great '80s hair, and she's a lot of fun.As for the plot, stick with me now. Jones plays a former CIA agent who's working for the government to steal a MacGuffin. When the bad guys are closing in, he hides it in a prototype auto, the Black Moon. A car-theft ring, of which Hamilton is the best thief and driver, steals the prototype, along with some other cars for the villainous Robert Vaughn, and it's hidden in his High-Rise Fortress of Autos.Jones has both the MacGuffin's owner and the government after him. Hamilton wants to get out of the car-stealing biz, and she has people after her, too. So naturally he convinces her to help him steal the car back.There's plenty of car-chase action here, and there's one great scene that was replicated (sort of) in a Fast and Furious movie. Naturally Jones and Hamilton fall for each other in the course of events.This is not a great movie, but it's fun, and the cast is tops. Besides Jones, Hamilton, and Vaughn there are Richard Jaeckel, Keenan Wynn, William Sanderson, and Bubba Smith. Check it out.

Inside the KGB’s Super Power Division:According to the former KGB general, as the USSR reached the height of the Cold War, the regime enlisted the country’s supernaturals, its Leninist X-Men, to the Soviet cause. “Almost all the people with supernatural powers were controlled by the KGB,” Ratnikov said. “You can’t even imagine the war of brains that unfolded in the first half of the last century. I’m hardly exaggerating when I say that sometimes there were astral battles.”

Houston Chronicle: Everything old is new again, so 35 years after "Urban Cowboy" became a box office hit, it is being developed into a TV show, which Variety reported earlier in the summer. And this week Fox announced that actor James Belushi has been cast to appear in the show's pilot in the part of a truck driver turned bar owner.

The New York Times: Oliver Sacks, the neurologist and acclaimed author who explored some of the brain’s strangest pathways in best-selling case histories like “The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat,” using his patients’ disorders as starting points for eloquent meditations on consciousness and the human condition, died Sunday at his home in New York City. He was 82. Hat tip to Jeff Meyerson.

ABC News: A former Cleveland-area attorney accused of hypnotizing women for his sexual pleasure has been charged with kidnapping, sexual battery and gross sexual imposition following an investigation that began last fall. Hat tip to Bill Pronzini.